High school water polo players wore Speedos and conservatives lost their minds

A debate has emerged at a Southern California high school about online pictures of high school athletes celebrating in their Speedos.

The Temecula Valley High School water polo team wanted to cheer on their friends on the high school baseball team, so they attended a game a couple of weeks and did just that, the Press-Enterprise, based in nearby Riverside, reported.

During part of their celebration, they revealed their Speedos — their competition uniforms — and cheered away.

It’s likely something they’d seen college athletes doing more and more, so they decided to follow “suit.”

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When images of the boys having fun in the stands were posted online, a debate ensued that has poured across social media and into the office of the superintendent of schools.

A couple of Temecula Valley Unified School District Board members criticized the photo’s posting, saying it was “one step closer to Chippendales,” and another referencing the online OF site that has become popular for risqué photos and videos.

Because of the criticism, the athletes’ Speedo images got widespread distribution from the Los Angeles Times, New York Post and others.

Speedos criticism is nothing new

Outsports has been criticized by some people over the years — and even in the last few weeks — for highlighting adults in their late teens or early 20s in Speedos with ripped bodies that look like those of men well beyond their age.

We’ve been extremely careful to not highlight underage teens for spectacle. We at Outsports have no place for that.

In addition, we have certainly highlighted younger swimmers or divers when they’ve chosen to come out publicly. Sometimes those people are in Speedos. There’s not much a publisher can do with a high school swimmer or diver whose competition images are in Speedos.

Outsports tries to include photos of LGBTQ athletes in competition, as the visual sends a message of LGBTQ participation beyond the words of any coming-out or being-out article.

The people who criticize Outsports’ choices of including a younger athlete in a Speedo are generally either anti-gay people thinking we’ve made some kind of perverse connection to the photo, or gay men themselves afraid of the connection those anti-gay people will make.

Water polo athletes being silly and having fun

Which brings us back to the photos of the Temecula Valley High School water polo team.

It wasn’t the parents of the athletes, or gay men, who connected a photo of these boys cheering on their teammates to OF or anything else of the sort. It was members of the conservative-leaning School District Board who made this connection.

Everybody else got the innocence of what the water polo players did.

“The fans loved it, the team loved it, the baseball coach loved it,” a parent of one of the boys, Sharon Sardina, wrote, according to The Press-Enterprise. “Everybody loved the support and thought that was pretty cool because that’s typically what water polo players do as far as cheering on their teams.”

It can be telling who automatically makes a risqué connection to any man in a Speedo. Most of these people would likely have no problem with a young woman appearing in her competition outfit, but the sight of any man in a Speedo still rocks some people.

There has been for decades a bizarre “fear of the bulge,” as we’ve called it. This idea that men and boys must wear baggy pants and shorts only. That has shifted across much of society in recent years, as people have become more comfortable with the realities of human physiology.

Some people are still stuck in 1987.

As for the boys, they were just having silly fun. Swimming, diving and water polo teams have been showing up more and more in Speedos to cheer on their friends and classmates. These guys were doing the same.

A photo of them shouldn’t draw comparisons to OF. That is much more about the person making the comparison than anyone else, including the young athletes.

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